Celebrities and Real Estate

We thought you’d enjoy some news about homes on the market that have associations with the rich and famous … and infamous.

Timothy Leary’s LSD Lair On Market at $1.5 Million

You can be the next owner of Timothy Leary’s former home in the San Jacinto Mountains southeast of LA. The 80-acre Forbes Ranch was ground-zero for Leary’s promotion of psychedelic drug use for self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment back in the ‘60s. He coined the hippie mantra of “turn on, tune in, drop out”. The flamboyant and controversial figure saw the inside of 36 prisons during his life time. When he died in 1995, some of his ashes were saved and later rocketed into space along with the ashes of Gene Roddenberry, the Star Trek creator. The satellite circled the earth for six years before falling out of orbit and being burned up on re-entry. Who knows? There may be some Timothy Leary particles scattered around the place where you live.

Frank Lloyd Wright Fixer-Upper, Available at $600K

In 1913, legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed a cottage for a lawyer friend named Sherman Booth. The 1,775 square foot home is located in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Glencoe and was Booth’s home temporarily as he was waiting for a larger family home to be constructed nearby. Amazingly, the house has only had three owners. The larger Booth home has also been on the market recently. Both properties have been looking for buyers for quite some time. The larger one was priced at $1.9 million in July 2016 and the price dropped a number of times until it stood at $1.15 million in August 2018. The cottage was at an asking price of $825,000 as recently as September last year but now stands at $599,900. Go figure.

Home of a President’s Youth Can Now Be Yours

Fred and Mary were living in the yellow, Tudor-style house at 85-15 Wareham Road in 1946 when they welcomed their 4^th child. They named him Donald. That’s right. We’re talking about President Trump’s boyhood home in Queens. It is on the market … AGAIN. The property sold for $1.39 million in 2016 and then for $2.14 million in 2017. Current asking price is $2.9 million. Don’t be thinking you can just bop on over for a showing. Interested buyers must submit their best offer and then can only see the house after providing proof of funds suitable for a cash purchase. Why cash only? According to the listing agent, buyers are willing to over pay for the home given its famous past and it likely would not appraise for normal financing. If contacted for comment, we suspect the president would reply with many of his favorite comments: “Huge! Amazing! Unbelievable! We are making Queens real estate great again.”

Honorable Mentions Go To:

• The 1,500 square foot suburban Seattle home where Jeff Bezos was living when he started Amazon in his garage is on the market for $1,488,888. Bezos, worth a reported $135 billion, never owned it. He was a tenant when he lived there in 1994.
• Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin recently complete the purchase of a Central Park South Penthouse for $238 million. Add that to other homes he owns in Chicago, Miami and London and his total real estate portfolio is $482 million or about 5% of his $10 billion net worth.